Food and Drug Administration investigators have found sterility problems — including the presence of insects and a bird — at Ameridose, a company that shares ownership with the firm tied to a deadly multistate meningitis outbreak.

According to an internal memo released by the manufacturer of dialysis drug GranuFlo, Fresenius Medical Care (FMC), 941 patients died of cardiac arrest in 2010 in clinics owned by the drug maker. FMC said the acid concentrate can increase the amount of bicarbonate in the blood, which increases the risk for heart attacks by up to 6 times.

Fifteen more people have been diagnosed with fungal meningitis in an outbreak linked to contaminated steroid injections, health officials reported today. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it now counted 419 cases in 19 states: 409 cases of fungal meningitis and 10 joint infections. At least 30 people have died.

Two more drugs made by the New England Compounding Center (NECC) are crawling with various kinds of bacteria, FDA tests reveal. The NECC is the Massachusetts compounding pharmacy whose drugs are the likely source of the ongoing outbreak of fungal meningitis.

The Food and Drug Administration has warned state officials and doctors to check hundreds of thousands of other shipments of drugs from the company responsible for the recent fungal meningitis outbreak. The health agency compiled a list of more than 130,000 drug shipments from the New England Compounding Center (NECC), whose steroid injection drug was found to be contaminated and the cause of at least 23 deaths and over 300 additional cases of illness.

The death toll linked to contaminated epidural steroid injections has reached 15, with an additional 202 reported cases of illness. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates at least 13,000 patients received an epidural from a batch of contamination steroids, leading to an outbreak of rare but deadly aspergillus meningitis.

The death toll from a rare form of fungal meningitis has risen to 11, officials said Tuesday, and they reported that 199 have now been sickened by an outbreak of the disease believed linked to contaminated steroid injections.